Homeland Security: We can all breathe easier now. The first major poll of the U.S. Muslim community finds that "only" one in four young Muslim Americans would be suicide bombers.
The liberal Pew Research Center, which surveyed 1,050 Muslims earlier this year, did its best to put a PC spin on the results.
It says its "overall" findings confirm that Muslims in America are "mostly mainstream" compared with their more radical co-religionists in Europe.
But as is usually the case with such polls, the devil is in the details.
Data buried deep inside Pew's 100-page report put the lie to the notion that our Muslim population rejects extremism.
An alarming 26% — or roughly 100,000 — of younger U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings against non-Muslim "civilian targets" are cool. That's really not any more comforting than the 35% of young Muslim Brits who told Pew the same thing after some of them bombed the London subway, killing 52 civilians and wounding another 700 or so.
You may recall how pundits here assured us our Muslim youth would never subscribe to such lunacy.
Pew, which defines younger Muslims as 18-29 years old, didn't poll Muslim youths under 18. We hazard to guess how many of them also embrace suicide attacks.
We also wonder if the responses would have been even more alarming had Pew (which was assisted in its questionnaire by a Council on American-Islamic Relations board member) had asked if suicide attacks on noncivilians, such as U.S. or Israeli soldiers, were justified.
Or if it took "suicide" out of the question and asked if "martyrdom operations," or "sacred explosions," were justified?
Equally alarming: the poll found that 55% of Muslim Americans — regardless of age — don't support the U.S. war on terror. That mirrors the 59% of Pakistanis who feel the same way.
Muslim Americans are at odds with the vast majority of Americans in general, 67% of whom do support the war.
Also consistent with the views of Muslims in Islamic countries, fewer than half of Muslim Americans — regardless of age — accept the fact that a group of Arab Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks. Many blame a conspiracy by U.S. or Israeli intelligence.
Only 5% of U.S. Muslims expressed favorable views of al-Qaida, though a quarter did not express an opinion. That means 3 in 10 Muslims surveyed have favorable or unknown views about our Enemy No. 1. How can any American be undecided about the evil of al-Qaida?
Even Pew in its footnotes suspects that Muslim respondents held back for fear they could be tipping off the FBI about their sympathies.
"Some respondents expressed suspicions about the purpose of the study and eventually broke off the interview," forfeiting a $50 participation stipend, it said in its report.
Also, the survey may have been biased in favor of secular Muslims. More devout Muslims who are more likely to interpret the Quran literally were "harder to reach," Pew acknowledged, as they were busy praying toward Mecca at all hours of the day.
Even without a true reflection of the fundamentalist element of Muslim America, the poll revealed the country is embedded with a ticking time bomb of Muslim youth who condone suicide bombings.
Now we'd like to see a follow up poll ask the simple question, "How many U.S. Muslims support holy war against infidels?" That one was never asked.
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